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COTA routes should serve job seekers

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I found the Dec. 29 Dispatch articles “COTA has its future in mind” and “COTA has traveled far in four decades” and the Jan. 3 Dispatch editorial “Mapping COTA’s future” informative and thought-provoking.

One statement in particular caught my interest: “The explosion of homes and businesses along I-270, particularly on the Far North Side, made it more practical to run buses to far-flung employment centers and set up park-and-ride facilities to bring people in the suburbs Downtown.”

There are a lot of good reasons to have public transportation available to suburbanites who work in the central city, but there are even stronger reasons to design the system to get inner-city residents out to the new jobs near and beyond I-270. Too many low-income Columbus residents live in neighborhoods with no good jobs (and hardly any jobs at all). Many of these people are entirely dependent on public transportation.

The solution to poverty, which plagues many families in our community, is jobs — good jobs — and public transportation plays a key role in achieving that solution. I hope that as COTA reviews its service map and schedules, it will pay close attention to the needs of reverse commuters going to work from the Near East Side to Easton, from Weinland Park to Polaris, and from the South Side to Rickenbacker Business Park, as well as to the needs of suburban riders headed to Broad and High.

We need to think about ideas analogous to park-and-ride for those going the other direction, like lines to areas of employment opportunities with service spreading out from there (smaller buses or vans?) to get people to work.

According to a national study by the Brookings Institute released in 2013, only 34 percent of metro Columbus jobs are reachable via public transit within 90 minutes. For people in our community dependent upon public transit, 66 percent of all jobs are simply out of reach.

This is a great opportunity for COTA to make a positive difference for its customers, but also for our community generally.